Exploring Art, Spirituality, and Heritage: A Conversation with Award-Winning Artist Mikael Owunna
Mikael Owunna embodies the definition of a multipotentialite. In addition to being a successful engineer, filmmaker, and award-winning photographer whose work has been exhibited internationally, he’s also the co-founder and executive director of Rainbow Serpent, a Black LGBTQ creative collective dedicated to promoting and celebrating Black LGBTQ culture.
Mikael is fluent in English and French and speaks basic Mandarin Chinese and Igbo. He’s been a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan, has documented over 50 LGBTQ Africans, lectured at prestigious venues including Harvard Law School, been featured in countless publications like the New York Times, and he’s showing no signs of slowing down.
As a queer, Irish-born Nigerian American artist, I was especially drawn to Mikael’s work in Myth-Science of the Gatekeepers, a collection of 16 glass sculptures of Black queer men cast as ancient Egyptian deities, created with his Rainbow Serpent partner Marques Redd. As we explored the exhibition together at the Pittsburgh Glass Center for a conversation about his artwork, I found myself feeling transported to a temple that gloriously indulged in the celebration of Africa’s full history.
As the eldest daughter of a Nigerian family, I also found kinship in learning of how Owunna conquered the most challenging moment in both his life and career as of yet: convincing African parents that pursuing the arts will not incite the end of mankind.
It was a thrill to spend time with Mikael, who is a former Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council grantee, while being introduced to his artwork in an environment where I felt fully accepted and took up the space I had spent so long trying not to take up in the physical world.
The below conversation has been condensed for space and clarity.
As someone with a hybrid professional identity – an engineer, a multimedia artist, a filmmaker and a photographer who has successfully placed yourself at the intersections of all three, how did you arrive at this point in your career? Did it diverge? Did it ever overlap? Was it always engineering and then art or …?
I didn't go in with a plan of, “Oh, I'm going to be an artist.” It was really driven by the tension I felt between my sexuality and my African identity.
When I was in high school, I was outed to members of my family in Nigeria. I was always kind of interested in sciences and, until my freshman year of college, I was studying biomedical engineering at Duke. For Christmas, we'd go back to Nigeria and when we were back my freshman year, I was put through a series of exorcisms in the village to drive the devil out of me. And so I came back from that experience, and I fell into a spiral of anxiety, and depression. I felt I didn't have a right to exist. And then, six months later, I was about to do a study abroad program, and one of my friends is, like, “We should get cameras before we go!” Like, sure. But when I picked up the camera, I felt like I found my voice again.
So I kept doing photography, really, as my passion and hobby all throughout college.
How are you able to navigate the familiar pressures to not pursue this passion after you've already successfully achieved the accomplishment of being an engineer, the typical accepted formats of success in Nigerian culture?
I mean, to be honest, my family still doesn't get it. They’re still just, like, when are you going to do something real? So I think the thing, though, is around who am I living my life for?
I think also understanding that they are people who are limited by their own life experience, and also their own understanding. I mean, the thing is when I actually did the research, and I was like, “Oh, there's never been any queer people in Nigeria?” And then I find all of this documentation, even within our writing system, so I was, like, “Oh, these people are wrong.”
And I know the right path for me. It's about taking a lot of that internal courage and fortitude, that Maahus energy to stand up and assert yourself. I still have to do that every single day.
Your work deals intimately with African cosmologies. While I admire your pursuit and for revealing the culture and mythologies prior to colonization, do you think you'll reach a point where you’ll feel like you've communicated all of the story or as much as you feel can be told from the documented tales?
I mean, there's so much more. I mean, even in Igbo tradition, there are nine cosmological strains that each have four different elemental creation methods associated with them. And these systems are all deeply in danger. I mean, they are all at the brink of being wiped out altogether. And so I think it's really around excavating and reviving all of these traditions as much as possible.
Even just the content alone. I think it shows how much we really need institutes of Black knowledge, preservation, and extension that other communities, other cultures have built. I think that's also part of what we’re trying to do with Rainbow Serpent is to build Black, queer cultural institutions that are also reviving and extending these systems.
You could spend an entire lifetime just trying to revive the Igbo, one cosmological strain. And so there's a lot of work to be done. There's a lot of work to be done. But I think it's ancestral work that’s a calling that needs to happen.
Do you feel as you're diving more into this work, you feel self-made limitations kind of falling away? I feel like that will be a very powerful kind of cathartic release as you're working through.
The work itself is transformative and so healing. I mean, I've said that the last four years, I've learned more about myself and my divine purpose to be here on this planet than I did in 30 years prior.